Who Is In Control of Your Bicycle?

This week I have been reading through Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book, which is about how we read the Bible. 

In Chapter 3, Peterson discusses the vital difference between using the Bible for our own purposes rather than "dealing with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you."  He goes on to reference C.S. Lewis and says the following:

"To put it bluntly, not everyone who gets interested in the Bible and even gets excited about the Bible wants to get involved with God.  But God is what the book is about.  C.S. Lewis, in the last book he wrote, talked about two kinds of reading, the reading in which we use a book for our own purposes and the reading in which we receive the author’s purposes.  The first ensures only bad reading; the second opens the possibility to good reading."

A footnote references an illustration from C.S. Lewis.  "The one [receiving] . . . is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored.  The other [using] is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides."

How do you read the Bible?  Do you read it to get more information?  Do you read it as a guidebook for what you ought and ought not do?  Do you read it to inspire and motivate you to do things?  Or do we, "read in order to get in on the revelation of God, who is so emphatically personal; we read the Bible the way it comes to us, not in the way we come to it; we submit ourselves to the various and complementary operations of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; we receive these words so that we can be formed now and for eternity to the glory of God."